CASR and heart failure: Subsequent studies have revealed the expression patterns and the critical role of CaSR in cardiac hypertrophy and apoptosis and have demonstrated that CaSR induces myocardial apoptosis through a mitochondrial dynamics-mediated apoptotic pathway in hypertensive hearts, aggravates myocardial hypertrophy through activation of autophagy, and induces Ca2+ release from the sarcoplasmic reticulum into the mitochondria in a rat model of heart failure (Lu et al., 2013; Hong et al., 2017).